Mack
This is a poem about strength– raw, unwavering, human strength. This is not physical prowess, but rather a tenacity based in love and kindness. For me, true strength is measured in character exhibited during hardship. It is much easier to showcase poise and generosity during times of prosperity. I have had the pleasure of witnessing a great example of retaining virtue in adversity through the subject of this poem: Mack.
Think about the lowest time in your life– a collection of days that stretched on like a thick fog, obscuring the path ahead and blocking the light beyond. During this time, what would you have done for a little bit of kindness? Or empathy? What would the smallest ounce of acknowledgement for your experience have done? I have witnessed fog that was so thick that it seeped into my senses and constricted my being. However, when it was hardest to breathe and move, hands appeared out of the mist and pulled me forward. One such pair of hands belonged to Mack.
I visited the Indiana Center For Recovery as a proverbial “hail Mary pass”. I entered their doors, disgruntled and disheveled from my early-morning drive to their facilities. Because I learned that I would not be able to complete my coursework for my current college classes while at the facility, I nearly walked out and drove back home, until I was convinced to stay by one of the employees performing my patient intake.
I began my treatment for mental health on Monday, October 30th. On Tuesday, October 31st, I missed a meeting for a group project in my entrepreneurship class. That night, I was laden with thoughts about the reactions of my group members when I didn’t show up to the Zoom call. I criticized myself as I thought, “All you had left was your reliability. What do you have now?”
While I was deep in thought, I encountered the subject of this essay as I strolled into the kitchen for a snack. She was sitting with a couple of other female patients, conversing about their lives outside of the facility. I found a way into the conversation and sat down to join them. Mack was the first person to notice that I looked distraught. I told her that I was disappointed about feeling unreliable to my group project members in a class I was taking. She immediately consoled me and told me that my duty, in this very moment, was to recover from my mental health struggles. This was the start of our friendship and the first of many conversations that motivated me throughout the therapeutic process of visiting the recovery center.
The time during which both of our visits overlapped lasted about three weeks. As these weeks progressed, sitting together during group therapy moved from a regularity to a certainty. I had a front row (although, it was a side view) seat to her intense stories about her family and life. I have always possessed a love for words and decided to write this poem for her, with the objective of recognizing her strength and uniquely unyielding courage. I gifted it to her in a closed envelope and told her to read it whenever she felt comfortable to do so. She returned to me in half an hour with tears in her eyes, thanking me for what I had written. She still owns the original poem, inscribed on a piece of paper torn from my journal.
Inspired by her life story and her kind reception to my writing, I began scribbling verse in my notebook everyday, charting the inklings of humanity that I observed from the other patients. In the months leading up to my visit to the recovery center, the aforementioned fog had clouded my creativity, extracting an ingenious desire from my soul. Mack and her story gave it back to me.
